Texas Instruments debuts 3D-without-glasses that doesn't suck

With help from 3M

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Texas Instruments has teamed up with 3M to offer a 3D experience without glasses and also without the use of a lenticular screen.

A tablet device was shown off at Mobile World Congress piping 3D images to your eyes, without the need for glasses but still using the stereoscopic – separate images to each eye – method of displaying 3D.

To create the effect, 3M has come up with a screen overlay for a 120-Hz LCD that directs images towards either your left eye and right eye.

The images are shown at 60fps and it creates a simulated 3D image.

HD in 3D

The display is currently powered by the Texas Instruments OMAP3 chipset but TI is promising to bring HD movies to life when it implements its OMAP4 chip.

Although the technology is in its nascent stages, it's refreshing to a company trying a new way to bring autostereoscopic 3D to consumers, instead of the frankly awful lenticular displays that are favoured by the advertising display market.

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Marc (Twitter, Google+) is the content team lead for Future Technology, where he is in charge of a 14-strong team of journalists who write many of the wonderful stories that end up on TechRadar, T3.com and T3 magazine. Prior to this he was deputy editor of TechRadar, had a 10-month stint editing a weekly iPad magazine, written film reviews for a whole host of publications and has been an integral part of many magazines that are no longer with us.